BACKGROUND Previous studies showed severe biochemical and functional damage to platelets in patients undergoing cardiopulmonary bypass for cardiac surgery, and suggested that this derived from the proteolytic action of plasmin on the platelet surface. METHODS A double-blind study was carried out to compare platelet function and composition in patients randomized to receive the protease inhibi...

OBJECTIVE This study aimed to analyze the impact of body mass index on outcomes of 101 patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting, valve replacement, or combined valve/ coronary artery bypass grafting surgery in a private hospital in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. METHODS This was a prospective cross-sectional study of patients undergoing cardiac surgery from May 2009 to December 2012. All ...

Cardiac surgery in patients with preexisting bleeding disorders can be a challenge. Cardiopulmonary bypass can lead to bleeding disorders, above all in patients with coagulopathy. We report the case of a 42-year-old woman, with type I von Willebrand disease, who underwent off-pump coronary artery bypass grafting. Beating heart surgery associated with an adequate replacement of von Willebrand fa...

In adults over 65 years of age, aortic valve stenosis has been found to be present in 2-9% within this group. Furthermore, aortic valve replacements in patients whom have had a previous coronary artery bypass grafting surgery have a mortality rate as high as 18%. A non-conventional effective surgical approach of bypassing the aortic valve by inserting an apicoaortic valve conduit (AVC) connecti...

In the study by Karaca et al. (1), published in the current issue of the journal authors have shown that use of blood cardioplegia in the reperfusion period after aortic cross clamp in patients with diabetes mellitus type II undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting surgery was superior to crystalloid solution in terms of myocardial protection as assessed by the degree of nitric oxide (NO) rel...

BACKGROUND We compared short-term outcomes of patients with chronic dialysis receiving bilateral internal thoracic artery (BITA) grafting with single internal thoracic artery (SITA) grafting using propensity score analysis. METHODS Between 2002 and 2008, 656 consecutive patients underwent isolated coronary artery bypass grafting (99.1% off-pump). Of these, 56 patients with chronic dialysis an...

OBJECTIVE To compare the perioperative incidence rates of hemolysis and inflammatory response in patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting with the two main types of cardiopulmonary bypass, centrifugal and roller pumps, and establish correlations among hemolytic and inflammatory changes. METHODS This was a prospective, randomized trial of 60 patients assigned to either roller pump (...

background: about half of all patients who undergo mitral valve surgery suffer from atrial fibrillation (af). cox described the surgical cut-and-sew maze procedure, which is an effective surgical method but has some complications. this study was designed to evaluate the efficacy of a substitution method of radiofrequency ablation (rfa) for patients undergoing mitral valve surgery with af. metho...

there is a paucity of literature regarding iatrogenic aortic valve perforation after cardiac operation is performed in the vicinity of the aortic valve. this report describes the clinical, echocardiographic, and angiocardiographic recognition of iatrogenic aortic valve perforation in a patient who had previously under gone membranous ventricular septal defect and pulmonary stenosis. five days a...

a 47 year-old female died after mitral valve replacement. post-cardiopulmonary bypass right ventricle was not able to pump despite good left ventricular contractility. at microscopic examination, diffuse right ventricular fatty infiltration was found. we found no previous report of this pathology in patients with mitral stenosis